Search Machine Learning Research Engineer, Perplexity AI
Conversational AI-powered search tool
Open for applications
Conversational AI-powered search tool
1001+ employees
Open for applications
1001+ employees
Company mission
To advance the way people discover and share information.
Role
Who you are
- Deep understanding of search and retrieval systems, including quality evaluation principles and metrics
- Proven track record with large-scale search or recommender systems
- Strong proficiency with PyTorch, including experience in distributed training techniques and performance optimization for large models
- Expertise in representation learning, including contrastive learning and embedding space alignment for multilingual and multimodal applications
- Strong publication record in AI/ML conferences or workshops (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, CVPR, SIGIR)
- Self-driven, with a strong sense of ownership and execution
- Minimum of 3 years (preferably 5+) working on search, recommender systems, or closely related research areas
What the job involves
- Perplexity is seeking an experienced Senior Machine Learning Engineer to help build the next generation of advanced search technologies, with a focus on retrieval and ranking
- Relentlessly push search quality forward — through models, data, tools, or any other leverage available
- Architect and build core components of the search platform and model stack
- Design, train, and optimize large-scale deep learning models using frameworks like PyTorch, leveraging distributed training (e.g., PyTorch Distributed, DeepSpeed, FSDP) and hardware acceleration, with a focus on retrieval and ranking models
- Conduct advanced research in representation learning, including contrastive learning, multilingual, and multimodal modeling for search and retrieval
- Deploy models — from boosting algorithms to LLMs — in a scalable and performant way
- Build and optimize RAG pipelines for grounding and answer generation
- Collaborate with Data, AI, Infrastructure, and Product teams to ensure fast and high-quality delivery
Our take
As AI continues to drive changes in both business operations and day-to-day lives, Perplexity AI delivers an intelligent search engine powered by conversational AI, to improve search outcomes and "unlock the power of knowledge" for all.
Reaching impressive heights of 22M monthly visits, Perplexity's "ask anything" method of search is clearly a popular one. And what sets it apart from other search engines is in its answers, which are concise and fully cited, responding to the user query rather than simply providing a place in which they can scroll to find it themselves.
The company has raised substantial funding, with contributions from former execs at companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Quora, demonstrating the interest that it has drummed up in the space. Having doubled its annual recurring revenue between 2023 and 24, this investment will allow Perplexity AI to continue building out its product, and accelerate growth into the future.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
Sep 2025
$200m
LATE VC
Jul 2025
$100m
LATE VC
Total funding: $1.7bn
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Aravind Srinivas
(Co-Founder, President & CEO)Former Research Scientist at OpenAI, who has interned in Research at Google and Deep Mind. Obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Denis Yarats
(Co-Founder & CTO)Prior to co-founding Perplexity in 2022, Denis was an AI Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research, a Staff ML Engineer at Quora, and a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft.
Johnny Ho
(Co-Founder & CSO)Previously a Quantitative Trader at Tower Research Capital, and Engineer at Quora.
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